As September’s ‘Organise Yourself’ theme goes on, I prepared an altered box tutorial, which I called Organized Trinkets. It originally was a tea box but since I have a lot of tea tins already, I decided to give it a new purpose 🙂 I wanted it to be user friendly – easy to clean and with a flat lid. In this case, my chosen way of embellishing was the paper collage technique.

Let’s get started!

First, I glued some bits and pieces (fabrics, threads, paper, tape) for texture and gessoed the whole surface.
Then I assembled some pictures to arrange a nice collage.

Next step was about adding colours. I played with browns, copper, naples yellow and gold.
To achieve some interesting results, I used various tools for applying the paint such as spatula, brush and sponge.

After applying all the paint layers, I randomly sanded the whole box to bring darker colours out.
This gave it a nice worn look.

Time for stamps and stencils!
It took me a while to decide which stencil to use – the choice has finally fallen to harlequin:)
The circles were made with a cap and acrylic paint.

Now to collaging! Some re-arrengements were made and some embelishments added to achieve this final look: